If that doesn’t work, you could do what I do for my forum signature: I have a script that generates a new image (using fortune, outputting an SVG, then converting it to PNG) every five minutes. Then, I just embed the image.http://meliaser.dyndns.tv/sig.png

I’m afraid of change. I used to have to read 80-250 essay/comments on these blogs in order to understand what conversations were going on and who had said what. Now I will be tempted to scan for replies to my posts, as will others. Looks neat though. Polished…

How much are you going to be tinkering with this, Eric? I’m going to need to update my own extension code to support the new formatting and I want to be sure we’re in a relatively final state before I do.

This makes it difficult to see where new comments are, but does reduce the need to @whoever to make clear to whom you’re replying, as well as quoting extensively. But if you’re going to do this, give us narrow margins.

OSnews.com has something like that. You can switch between two or three different modes of viewing comments. Not sure if they are using WordPress or not. And, to be honest I am not a huge fan of their comment system. Seems a bit over-complicated to me.

Eeek! I’m almost kind of sad to see the old style go, but, forward progress onwards!

Theoretically, I should have a gravatar as well.
I’d agree with reducing the font-size by a pt or two, at least for the comments. Large font is nice, but leads to more scrolling and squished comments when heavily nested. And it’s not really a usability concern, as all modern browsers allow you to manually adjust the font size.

Change is only progress if it does move you forward. While threaded discussion will be an improvement, I don’t think rapidly narrowing columns and ridiculously wide margins are. And I think unreadably narrow columns of text are too high a price for threading.

This is bad. One of the things that makes A&D better than the average blog is the quality of the comments, which often have more meat in them than other blogs’ articles. This formatting makes it very difficult to read the comments.

And $DEITY help us if we do feel the need to use blockquotes in deeply-nested replies

Because it looks “pretty”, I guess; nevermind any actual practical consequences of them.

I like threaded/nested comments but there should be an easy way to see which comments are new from the last time a page was viewed… the old non-nested comments weren’t too bad in this regard if you could just find the last point you read.

That. Basic typesetting stuff. Unfortunately for nested comments, you wind up with too-thin columns after a couple of indents. I think the right solution might be to indent the left margin and outdent the right margin with each level. Also I’d like to see outline-style comments so I could collapse threads, like some text-based Usenet readers used to do.

I may be proved wrong (and I’m sorry to say it, because nesting *is* cool) but I have a feeling that this new style isn’t going to be a good fit for this particular blog. The ‘threads’ on this site continue for tens or even hundreds of comments sometimes. There’s just no way to accommodate that kind of tree depth on a web page.

It’s an interesting design problem because you are forced to make compromises. There is a limited amount of space so you can’t just have endless nesting, but on the other hand you want to be able to distinguish between different threads of conversation. But then again, by making the threads easier to recognise you create a new problem of not being able to easily see new comments just by looking at the bottom of the post.

So, you compromise and have nested posting but with a depth limit. But then, when people inevitably go over the limit we will just revert back to having chronological flat posts with people quoting and @ing one another.

You can have new posts highlighted somehow, but that means people will have to scroll through the entire post history to see them.

You want to have strong identities so you enable gravatar, but some people don’t use gravatar so they end up with the anonymous face and so you actually might end up with less-strong differentiation between posters than before.

Design. It’s all about compromises. What compromises you make depends on your priorities.

Ideally what we’d want is some sort of hybrid blog/newsgroup, where comment threads are presented auto-collapsed and new posts/updated threads are highlighted in some way. Then you click to expand and read.

That really was a much more efficient way of having conversations than web-based forums. HTML was just not designed for that sort of interactivity. We a whole protocol designed to be a forum, and we abandoned it! Why?

We are trying to force a medium that was designed for document markup into doing the job of a dedicated protocol, with obviously sub-optimal results.

Not strictly fair. The advantage of the blog form over straight Usenet is a unique degree of moderation (less authoritarian than a moderated group, moreso than an unmoderated one) and a huge increase in organization.

I agree, usenet was far, far better for arguments because of the way the system was designed. If someone wanted to code a forum system that worked similarly to usenet they could make a name for themselves.

I wonder why usenet fell out of favour. Granted, it is a bit more complicated to set up and get running than just loading up a web forum, but I would have thought that the benefits would outweigh that initial overhead.

It’s a shame everything’s been webified. I wonder how much of that is left over from the drive to escape Microsoft’s clutches on the desktop back in the ’90s.

One advantage of using web based forums/blogs is that you don’t have to worry about which server you connect to in order to get all the feeds. With the web you just type in the address and *boom* you’re done.

The problem is that if one person is viewing as nested then they might rely on that to provide context for their reply, rather than using quotes as we used to. If somebody is viewing as chronological then that context is lost.

I agree with Winter and maybe all this blog needs is a quote mechanism.

I read more than I comment, and only come here in the evenings (Belgium time), after work. In the old flat style I used to just scroll up from the bottom of the comments to the last comment I remembered reading.

In a nested style, that isn’t going to work. (I’ve been trying to pick up from where I left in the Company X / Hacker discussion ever since this theme change happened. Still lost – 400 comments is way to much to see who added what where).

One fix I have for reading non-nested comments is to read the comments in an rss reader. Unfortunately with the rss reader, it’s difficult to understand the conversation because people don’t quote in nested replies. At least I can easily see which comments I haven’t read and the order in which they were posted.

Not sure that nested comments work well for this site. It seems to me the discussions here tend to follow a single thread most of the time, and as others have pointed out, finding new comments requires rescanning the entire comment tree rather than finding the last post you read. Also, while I haven’t tried it on a phone yet, and I don’t have specific numbers, it certainly feels like this theme adds considerably to the time it takes to load the comments page. Sure this might work for most blogs that have maybe 50 comments on a post on a good day, but I imagine, that you’re probably averaging closer to 200 / post (194 on the front page as of the time of this post).

Bad: The old next / previous links included the titles of the posts. I miss that.

On the fence: I like threaded comments, but I also like the ability to hop through unread comments (two imperfect solutions: (1) cookies break for users of multiple browsers / machines / VMs; (2) cumbersome sign-ins).

Monster and anyone else unhappy with the new theme can now help fix it. I’ve created a gitorious project at

git@@gitorious.org:twentyeleven/twentyeleven.git

(Use a single @; I had to double it to get around WordPress generating a mail URL.)

It includes all the changes I’ve made locally to nuke the padding and the fixed-sized bounding box. Monster, you can go after the margins. I’m going to get rid of as many px dimensions as I can, they look bad on any display with a pixel density different than what the theme designer was expecting.

The old template had a comment in the source HTML documenting the mark-up tags permitted in comments. I could not find the equivalent in the repository, but it might be a nice link to add to the Comment / Reply form.

Hat is firmly on head…I notice that threaded comments may lead to scanning the comments for something to reply to before hitting the main comment-input at the bottom, where they may initiate a new thread.

I don’t know if this is by design or not, nor how it will affect typical commenting practice.

Selfish complaint: the new layout can’t be viewed zoomed all the way in without squashing things into a mess (common for flashy modern web design). Please don’t change things on my account, but I wonder how many other readers have low vision? The font is also much harder to read than the old one, probably because it’s not as bold.

It looks modern, but there’s a lot of whitespace to wade through. The white background hurts my eyes when I stare at it too long. One super useful feature that would be nice is the ability to preview comments.

People say they want nested comments, but they really don’t. They’ll keep saying they do until they’re blue in the face but what they really want is something else which they only think is provided by nested comments. With nested comments it’s hard to keep up with the conversation when new posts are scattered throughout the page. You lose the ability to map the chronology of the posts, plus you still have to scroll through the entire page to see if you miss anything. You can get around this with an rss reader and subscribe to each blog post. Then you lose the context of the conversation because people don’t quote. In fact, quoting while using nested comments would aggravate the format problems.

I think what people are really saying when they say they want nested comments is that they want threaded comments. In other words, they want the abilities to collapse threads into one line designated by topic title and to have topics with new comments appear at the top or at the bottom of the page.

These functions are already provided by web based forums. Topics are collapsed into titles. Topics with new posts appear in bold at the top. Plus you have the option of going to the last read post in the topic or just going to the beginning or end of the topic. You can fast forward or rewind through the pages, by clicking on page numbers. You can even search the forum for key words or look at a users posts. In fact a forum in which only esr could create new topics would be functionally equivalent to a blog. There are even smartphone apps that you can use to follow forums.

There are problems. A forum below each blog post may be overkill and I don’t even know how problematic it would be to dynamically create a forum for each blog post. Esr wants one database for backup and search and the term “forum” is problematic. It implies that the area provided is is there primarily to serve the community while a blog is seen as an entity wholly owned by its creator.

So there are a few solutions. 1) You can have a forum for the entire website. Designate esr as the only person who can create new topics. Then see if you can style it so that it mimics a blog’s format, i.e. a new page for each topic with a summary of each topic on the first page of the site. 2) Esr can find some other solution to backup and search which allows multiple databases 3) chuck the whole idea of threaded comments.

People haven’t said they want nested comments, people have claimed to, and actually do, want threaded comments. Nesting is just one, fairly poor, way of showing the threading.

One better way of doing it is the way it’s done on Less Wrong, fairly shallow left side nesting, with borders around comments that change after having been viewed. Though even the shallower indenting they use would be too much for some of the threads here.

Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I misinterpreted the phenomena I saw as comments starting off as “Yeah nesting!” inevitably followed by all the other comments which say, “Nesting is cool, but…” That’s a sign that people are confused about their desires.

Thanks for pointing out Less Wrong. Those comments are better themed much better, but it’s very easy to skip replies to comments when they’re collapsed. That can be considered a bug or a feature.

I think my critique still stands. Nesting provides minimal benefits and breaks basic features that are useful to read comments. The attempt to use nesting to provide functionality of threading is ultimately doomed. I’m willing to bet some non-existent dollars on that.

The old theme is superior:
1. Packs more information on one screen while at the same time being MORE readable. Too much empty space here.
2. Nested comments is not a great a idea. The threads normally develop linearly and are best consumed by the avid readers of this blog linearly. Nested comments remind me of excessive layering in software (ie make your head spin)
– Old theme uses Sans-serif font. New theme uses Serif font. Serif is less readable on a computer screen.

Wholly agreed. I like whitespace as much as the next guy, but the changes, all told, don’t make the thing more readable. In no particular order:

* the new font, for now, is Times New Roman (although I suspect this is because of a missing semicolon); it’s **much** less readable than Lucida Grande (the old sans-serif font that I saw). If you want to try something new and still readable, consider using Open Sans from Google Web Fonts (or locally hosted) at, say, 12 or 13 points.
* A number of other commenters say the font is too large for the comments box. I think the font is too *small* on my desktop (although I tend to think most web pages have too-small fonts). The big problem is that when I press cmd-= (ctrl-= elsewhere) to zoom in the page, the text gets bigger **but the width of the comments boxes gets no wider**. From what I can tell, this is because you have .commentlist { margin: 0 auto; width: 68.9%; } (auto margins on the side combined with a percentage width). If you replace “width: 68.9%” with “max-width: 960px” you’ll get something that behaves more sensibly when zoomed in on webkit- and gecko-based browsers.
* I *never* thought I’d say this, but I’m against nested comments on the ground that they linearize poorly. With the old system, I could bookmark a particular comment and then come back later to finish up (or to see new comments that’ve been posted since). With the new way, I have to start at the top every time and skip over lots of stuff, however enlightening, that I’ve already read.

I already mentioned this upthread, but is the theme on gitorious cloneable by everyone, or just a select few?

Dislike. Too Google-Plusy for me. Too whitespace. That being said, it seems to be the norm nowadays.

Have you considered creating a mailing list for this blog? It’s the easiest way to have a Usenet-esque experience these days.

I’ve seen one tech blog which has posts and comments, as usual, but the bulk of the interesting discussions happens on the mailing list; the blog author then sometimes picks or develops certain topics as a blog post.